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Friday, March 8, 2013

Breaking the Silence

It was a long walk.

And after his emotional endorsement of torturing damned human souls, Wyver became pensive and reticent. Perhaps he was pondering the finer glories of what a knife could do to human skin. He hadn't seemed to be much of a conversationalist before, and now it appeared that he held the silence in some sort of reverence.

I may be the Devil, but I'm still a teenager. I was born in the nineties. Like most of the millennial generation, I like to be entertained. And I don't like walking if I'm not reaching a destination soon. Despite the fact that we'd clearly left the Department of Enforcement far behind, it didn't look like anything else had gotten any closer.

I was antsy. I needed to speak. I needed to do something to pass the time. I needed to hurry up and do something that would require less time for our travels.

"Don't you guys have, like, vehicles or anything? Like a Jeep or something, so we could get there faster?" I felt like a junkie walking into a pharmacy and trying to convince the nice lady behind the counter to give me drugs.

"No," Wyver replied. "The Department of Transportation is mostly responsible for the transport of souls from their barracks to their torture and back again. The shuttles almost exclusively run between the Barracks of the Damned and the Department of Torture."

That answer, though unsurprising, was very unsatisfying. And not just because of the tone in his voice that made me feel like I'd asked a ridiculous, laughably uninformed question. Like I'd just asked the President of the United States if he was an actor because he looked really familiar.

"You don't have an old golf cart laying around or anything?" I asked. It was a brilliant follow-up question. Imagine me and this scrawny cornflower blue demon bouncing across the bleakest deserts of Hell in a beat-up golf cart.

"Why would we have a golf cart?" Wyver replied. "You think Kivra pulls someone's entrails out of his throat and then goes off to play a quick nine holes before inserting live piranhas in his rectum?"